John Crowe Ransom

1888-1974

John Crowe Ransom was born in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1888. He was educated at Vanderbilt University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1909; he also attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. An academic for most of his life, Ransom was employed as a professor at Vanderbilt and later at Kenyon College. Ransom had a far-reaching impact on poets and academics of his time, most notably with the philosophy he laid out in The New Criticism (1941). Ransom promoted traditional values in his works of poetry as well as his critical essays and both were highly acclaimed during his lifetime. Collections of verse include: Poems About God (1919), Chills and Fever (1924), Grace After Meat (1924), and Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1926).